On My Mind

​Hospital birth is the Walmart of delivery. The generic, big box store, one size fits all, no frills, experience. In fact I’d bet some of the sweet hospital volunteers I encountered moonlight as Walmart greeters. If you choose to have your baby in a hospital, you know they have (and can do) everything you need, but it’s not a terribly exciting choice and the fluorescent lighting sucks.

Birthing centers, especially those attached to the dreaded hospital, are more like a Target. They provide better backdrops for the gauzy photos that will clog your instagram feed and a feeling that your choice is more natural and chicer. But when push comes to push, let’s be honest, you didn’t want to be too far from the epidural, the OR and the NICU.

And home births, well they are the boutique choice. There is no sifting through cheaply made, mass marketed goods. No trudging through housewares and electronics to grab a box of KIND bars from the pantry area. This is all about you -- small, intimate, customized. Have your baby in a tub, in your bed, hell I just read about a woman who had her baby on a school bus (yes, on purpose). Forget about hospital visiting rules, invite over your yoga instructor and dog trainer, eat ripe plums while pushing, swing from a tree in your backyard, blast music and burn incense. Just hope that nothing goes wrong.

I guess it’s confession time. As it turns out, you can count me among the people of Walmart. I always knew my son would be born in a hospital.

What I didn’t expect happened the day after I brought him home, when a lactation consultant arrived to help me with breastfeeding.

After getting settled, she asked me a series of questions, chief among them the circumstances of my child’s birth. I explained that I had developed preeclampsia at 35 weeks and was induced at 37 weeks. After nearly 24 hours of medication to soften my cervix, which remained as soft as the tiled floor, and two wildly unpleasant and unsuccessful attempts at placing a balloon catheter (which sounds and feels like a bad circus trick) I accepted the offer of a c-section.

From the moment I decided on the surgery I felt calmer about the entire process. For me, the fear of how they were going to get a baby who wasn’t budging out of my vagina (thoughts of vacuums and forceps danced in my head) was far greater than the prospect of expertly slicing open my abdomen and plucking him out. Though the medicine administered made me shake like Shakira’s booty, the c-section was not chaotic or frightening in any way.

I explained to the lactation consultant that I had no complications and was healing well from the surgery. “Oh, honey, you had a traumatic birth,” she said, putting her hand on mine. “It’s okay, all hospital births are traumatic.”

Did I hear that correctly? All hospital births are traumatic? What has happened to our worldview when we label an institution that has saved the lives of countless mothers and babies as traumatic in all circumstances? This is more warped than my nipples after three months in a pump.

Prior to having my son I had a missed miscarriage at ten weeks. Feeling the sonographer move the cold transducer across my belly hopelessly looking for signs of life, the wait while she summoned the doctor and the inevitable, “there is no longer a heartbeat,” -- that was traumatic. Struggling with infertility while stationed in the Middle East with my husband, enduring months of disappointment and searching for a decent doctor, that was also traumatic. But having a healthy baby via the medical marvel of a c-section due to a health condition that was identified early and treated appropriately, having a say in my care, being attended to by knowledgeable doctors in a world class hospital -- that was most certainly not traumatic.

Real trauma, unfortunately, is much more likely when women buy into the romanticized notion of home birth at all costs, a scenario that often places mothers and babies far from life saving interventions when they may need them most. Real trauma is losing your life or your baby’s because a condition that could be treated in a hospital occurred outside of one.

Hospital birth is not perfect -- it often lacks privacy and comes with a glut of one-size fits all institutional rules. The gowns are hideous, the beds are uncomfortable and you may end up with Nurse Ratched. No matter how much essential oil you diffuse or soft music you play or twinkling lights you string up, you’re still in a hospital. It’s not trendy or posh or daring. I wouldn’t have it any other way.